Johann Hari: The real solution to our prisons crisis

In Wormwood Scrubs I met Anthony. He had brain damage and asked me if I was his father

"Watch yourself. In prisons, you don't know what's going to be thrown at you," the grey-skinned prison guard warned me as I wandered through the bowels of Wormwood Scrubs for the first time, past rows of cells stocked with mentally ill prisoners dribbling and wailing and locked in fierce arguments with people who were not there.

I wonder if John Reid was given the same advice when he bellyflopped into the Home Office five months ago. Well, now he knows. The decade-long rumble of predictions from the Prisons Inspectorate and the prison reform charities has come to pass: if you double the prison population in a decade, the system will simply crumple before your eyes.

Of course, much of the press has seen this through the prism of high (that is, very, very low) Westminster politics. Well, I'm as glad as anybody else that John Reid is now a busted lush, unable to run against Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership - but this crisis goes far beyond Annie's Bar.

If you have been following this affair, you probably think there is now a small increased danger to your safety, because some judges have released a handful of criminals who otherwise would have been banged up. (So far, they amount to two men who downloaded images of children being raped, and a cannabis smuggler.) But the risk is greater and more subtle than that. As a direct result of the overstuffing set in train by the Tories and loyally followed by Labour, prisoners are now far more likely to leave jail homeless, jobless, out-of-touch with their families, and still illiterate and drug-addicted. Every single one of these factors makes them more likely to attack you.

The reality is simple. There is enough cash in the pot to educate, detox and train around 20,000 prisoners. Cram in 80,000, and nobody gets a decent service. In 1992 - the year before the great stuffing began - 48 per cent of prisoners were successfully rehabilitated, meaning they did not reoffend within two years. Today, the figure has collapsed to 33 per cent, and is falling further. This is a classic example of how following "tough", "common sense" policies in the sacred name of The Victim actually leads to more crime and more victims in the end.

If you came with me to, say, Deerbolt Young Offender Institute in Durham, you would identify one obvious problem before all others: the kids there can't read. Some 60 per cent are unable even to scrawl their own names properly. So surely we are flooding the place with teachers? The Howard League for Penal Reform went there - and found that due to the financial strain on prisons caused by overcrowding, less than half of these illiterate kids were getting any schooling at all. Most of them spent all day in their cells watching TV, stuck with nobody but Jeremy Kyle, Noel Edmonds, and other prisoners to teach them.

This waste is being replicated at Her Majesty's sadistic Pleasure across Britain. The Adult Learning Inspectorate has reported that 60 per cent of prisons are failing to provide adequate training, and only 8 per cent of prisoners are doing meaningful work.

There are a few shimmering exceptions. In Aylesbury Young Offender Institute I've met lads - jailed for shootings and stabbings - being trained to become mechanics. Often, it's the first encouragement they've ever received from an adult. In Liverpool Prison, there's a visionary programme where the inmates learn to become a qualified painter-decorator by renovating a dilapidated council house - and then move into it when they are freed. This should be happening in every British prison.

But as Cherie Booth QC said in a brilliant lecture, "The huge increase in numbers and the prevalence of short-term sentences is crippling any attempt at a constructive approach to rehabilitation."

Unfortunately, another resident of No 10, Tony Blair, has responded by rummaging around for the old Conservative script: the solution is simply to build more jails, stretching the same prisons budget over even more prisoners.

There is another way. That day in Wormwood Scrubs, I met a prisoner called Anthony. He was brought to the prison six months before, because he had been found walking around his neighbourhood naked. He was quickly diagnosed as suffering from irreparable brain damage and early-onset dementia. He is 45; he looks 65. He shuffled into the room, trailing behind him a large plastic bag full of rubbish that he carries everywhere. He didn't know where he was, and spoke only in slow, incoherent sentences. For a moment, he thought I was the judge who remanded him. Then he asked if I was his father.

When I told Luke Sergent, the prison governor, about the slew of insane people I found in his custody, he was in despair: "It's quite common. There is no doubt we have people in this prison who are so mentally ill they shouldn't be here." Wormwood Scrubs is no exception. Since the closure of the old asylums, the numbers have been swelling so that today 10 per cent of British prisoners - 8,000 people - have schizophrenia or a delusional disorder. The Prisons Inspector's medical expert says that 40 per cent of the people in hospital wings are like this, so mentally ill they should be sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Instead, they are being punished, in wards the former Director General of the Prison Service, Martin Narey, admits are "worse than the kennels I leave my dog in when I go on holiday". The Prisons Inspector herself, Ann Owers, recently found a man in a prison who had his wrists straitjacketed to his waist. When she asked how long he was kept like this, the prison officers explained it was permanent, because whenever it was removed he tried to hack off his own testicles.

The Government has made this crisis into another excuse to reinforce the failing right-wing agenda of the past decade. Instead, it should be seized as a moment to transfer the stifling cellfulls of the insane out of our jails and into secure NHS hospitals. Build hospital capacity, not prison capacity.

And while they're at it, they could clear even more space. Why do we need to imprison nearly 2,000 people a year who are too poor to pay their fines? Why are we jailing 1000 heroin-addicted women a year for selling sex? Why are more women locked up for shoplifting than any other offence? Why are we imprisoning more than 10,000 people a year for possessing or selling soft drugs like cannabis? (Did anyone feel less safe when they found out that cannabis smuggler was freed?)

Only once we have cleared all the mentally ill and the non-violent offenders from our jails will we finally have the space to return to real rehabilitation. Our prisons need to be schools - not Bedlams.

j.hari@independent.co.uk